Tag: abortion

We need gun control now to save the kids, or at least the ones we didn’t abort…

With all the lip service that gets paid to “equality,” guns are about the best equalizers we currently have, whether you’re dealing with the micro level (a hundred-pound woman with a single concealed-carry pistol to fend off a rapist) or the macro level (over three hundred million guns, legal and illegal, floating amid private hands to counterbalance a super-powerful government’s obscene cache of high-tech weapons).

With all the shrieking we hear about “saving the children,” you don’t hear much about saving them from a government that has already indentured them in the future to pay off its current debts.

In May 2013 I found out I was pregnant. I found this news to be quite difficult as I had just ended a very violent relationship. This man was not only violent to me, but to my son as well. When I told my family and a few close friends they all suggested the best option was to abort the baby. They believed it would be too hard to have a child as a constant reminder of her biological father and the things he did to me…

Soon after this my father got the 180 movie, and said to me you really need to watch this. I watched it and have never been so convicted in my life. When you said, “Why punish a child based on the sins of the father” it bought me to tears. I have never felt so ashamed.

I since have become a Christian, and completely changed my life for the better. I feel amazing, like a new person. I’m attending church with my children, I finally feel like I belong somewhere. I honestly think seeing the movie 180 saved my baby’s life. My family and friends have all come together because of this beautiful, precious gift God gave me. God knitted my daughter together in my womb, she is not a mistake but a precious, precious gift from God.

In early July, a woman learned through pre-natal testing that her baby had Down Syndrome. She went to an adoption agency and explained that she would abort the baby if a family could not be found to adopt her child in the next few days. In a little over a day, some fifteen hundred offers of adoption came in…

By the end of the parish work day on July 8th, parish staff had processed over 1,000 emails and over 500 phone calls from persons willing to make the sacrifice of adopting the child. Now the references have been vetted, and the birth mother is working with the adoption agency to make a suitable choice.

CMI [Creation Ministries International], thank you for bringing a Biblical perspective to these important issues. Abortion is an issue that is very dear to my heart. I am adopted, but was never considered for abortion. However, one of my friends is also adopted. Her birth mother accidentally called an adoption center instead of an abortion center.

My two cents

People usually think of accidents as a bad thing. But in this case, it turned out to be a good thing. How pleasing to see that the pregnant mother changed her mind and avoided an abortion. Sometimes I’m curious to learn about people who found out they were put up for adoption (instead of being aborted); I wonder if most of them agree that abortion is wrong and adoption is right.

I also like how the quote came from a 17-year-old. I say this because when teenagers (of the 21st century) are opposing abortion, then the feminists’ current attempts to indoctrinate girls (by couching abortion as a woman’s “right”) are failing. Hopefully there will be enough politicians to abort the pro-abort position and adopt a smarter way of thinking.

The alleged right of individuals (such as fetuses and newborns) to develop their potentiality, which someone defends, is over-ridden by the interests of actual people (parents, family, society) to pursue their own well-being because, as we have just argued, merely potential people cannot be harmed by not being brought into existence. Actual people’s well-being could be threatened by the new (even if healthy) child requiring energy, money and care which the family might happen to be in short supply of. Sometimes this situation can be prevented through an abortion, but in some other cases this is not possible.

While Bill Vallicella was speaking about Bill O’Reilly, his comment could just as well be applied to Myers:

The other night Bill O’Reilly said that a fetus is a potential human life. Not so! A fetus is an actual human life.

Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother. It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an adolescent, an adult, a corpse. And let’s be clear that a potential X is not an X. A potential oak tree is not an oak tree. A potential neonate is not a neonate. A potential speaker of Turkish is not a Turkish speaker. But an acorn, though only potentially an oak tree, is an actual acorn, not a potential acorn. And its potentialities are actually possessed by it, not potentially possessed by it.

The typical human fetus is an actual, living, human biological individual that actually possesses various potentialities. So if you accept that there is a general, albeit not exceptionless, prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then you need to explain why you think a third-trimester fetus does not fall under this prohibition. You need to find a morally relevant difference—not just any old difference, but a difference that makes a moral difference—between the fetus and any born human individual.

My two cents

Some time ago I came across the preborn/unborn child being (mis)conceptualised as a ‘potential’ human being. That kind of sounds reasonable on a superficial level, but when one digs deeper, it’s not really the case.

When I think of PZ Myers, I guess I think of Ray Comfort’s Evolution Vs. God documentary, where Myers was asked if bananas are our cousins, to which he said yes.

I suppose an (evolutionist) biologist could answer questions on descent and family relations with degree of confidence and stability. But when reaching out towards philosophy and ethics, it was more like overextending and falling over.

There ought to be a label for the logical and/or philosophical fallacies embodied in the first quote. It seems that RationalWiki is keen on cataloging and hurling logical fallacy labels—though not in this case. I therefore need to find a Latin scholar who can advise of the correct translation for the appeal to potential personhood: argumentum ad [insert Latin here]?

Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the National Abortion Federation both REQUIRE ultrasounds to be performed before an abortion takes place […]

There is one reason for this. They need to be able to see exactly how far along the woman is in her pregnancy so the abortion facility knows how much to charge for the abortion. There is one reason they don’t want women to see their ultrasound…it is too risky. Ultrasounds expose the lie of the abortion industry. They show that it is not just a “blob of tissue” or a “mass of cells.”

Ultrasounds show the humanity of the child.

My two cents

Unborn baby at 29 weeks in a 3D ultrasound (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I like it when the visual reality of an ultrasound trumps the rhetoric and red herrings of the abortion lobby. Now that 3D ultrasound is becoming more commonplace, I hope that brings the reality home even harder.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a mother of two children. I think she had a 2D ultrasound with her first child, but was able to get a 3D ultrasound of her second child. She had photos of both ultrasounds on her phone, and we got talking. Throughout the whole conversation, I was waiting to see if she was going to describe the images as depicting blobs of tissues, or babies. I’m glad to say that she went entirely for the latter.

I think of the Choices of Life ministry, where they go to schools and show pictures of unborn babies to teenage students. They had testimonies of those students who (also) described the unborn as babies, and not just cells. That’s a really encouraging sign, and I hope that 3D ultrasounds can become part of the ministry’s arsenal.

More broadly, this raises the question of The Silent Scream documentary from 1984. I heard that some feminists criticised that film for being misleading and for the video being open to interpretation (perhaps because video footage from that era wasn’t always the best). If that’s true, then there shouldn’t be any ambiguity in today’s world of 3D ultrasound and high-definition cameras. Will there (or should there) be a remake?

After Washington failed to defund Planned Parenthood, state legislatures immediately took the battle into their own hands on their own turf.

According to the SBA List State by State Scoreboard, Planned Parenthood has lost over $61 million from 9 states after they cut tax-based funding to the abortion giant. The states include Florida, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.

In the wake of these defunding efforts, numerous Planned Parenthood clinics have been forced to shutter their windows in several states.

Just when I thought that the abortion lobby was an unstoppable freight train, perhaps a way of slowing it is to stop maintaining the rail track it rides on. I don’t imagine too many organisations could take a $61 million funding cut in their stride. And I always think of that satire of Planned Parenthood in South Park where the building sign said ‘Unplanned Parenthood’.